Two U graduates have created a way to make electricity with a camping stove.
Power Practical, a company started by David Toledo and Paul Slusser, who both received degrees from the U in material science, have created a pot with the ability to capture the energy from a flame. Toledo said the company’s mission is to make electronically efficient devises.
The company’s recent cornerstone product is the PowerPot, which is a general sized camping pot, but when placed over a flame it generates electricity for charging cellphones and MP3 players. The PowerPot is an anodize aluminum container which is installed with thermodynamics equipment on the bottom.
The equipment has the potential to generate as much electricity as “your phone can take,” meaning that it’s possible to charge your iPhone while backpacking with the same efficiency as with a wall charger.
“So at 5 watts it’s at the same rate as at home, off your wall charger. For most phones that’s like an hour [to charge],” Toledo said, “so when I make a Ramen or something, for example, it’ll put like 20 percent into my phone.”
Toledo and Slusser are both outdoor enthusiasts and they came across this idea while they were sitting around a campfire.
“What we wanted to do was harness some of the power of the campfire, which mostly goes up into the sky,” Toledo said.
Their original benchmark was something to generate enough power to run small USB speakers. After experimenting and “tinkering,” Toledo said, they found that the method of installing thermodynamics onto the bottom of a pot was “a really good a way of generating power.”
So far, Toledo said, they have sold roughly 6,000 PowerPots. The PowerPot sells for retail at $149 dollars. This means a cash flow of $894,000 within the past two years.
“We started going after retail, trying to get into actual store last January, 2013,” Toledo said.
Starting next year the product will be shelved at REI.
“There’s companies that have been around for decade and have gotten that,” Toledo said.
The initial funding of the project was grassroots.
“Paul and I put some money into the company. We just split it 50/50 and went to the University Credit Union and started an account” he said.
They used that money to start-up and design the product until they had a working prototype. After a functioning prototype was developed, to get moving to the next stage, they found some outside funding from family and friends.
Their big break came when they put their product on Kickstarter and raised $126,000 for their business in April 2012.
“After that we raised money from local investment community Park City Angels and a local seed fund,” Toledo said. “That’s it today, except a second Kickstarter campaign, which was for the Power Meter last June, and ended in July, [where] we raised another $167,000.”
The Power Meter is the company’s latest product. The Power Meter is a device you connect to your charger to optimize the amount of power that is going to your devise.
“There are thousands of USB devises and thousands of USB cables and thousands of USB chargers, and they’re not all compatible with each other,” Toledo said, “So this just lets you simply see if it’s charging at full power or half power.”
The application of the PowerPot goes beyond merely a camping devise. Power Practical has been in contact with non-governmental organizations and has made shipments of their PowerPot to developing nations.
“They have a tea they drink down there [Uganda], and they have been using the PowerPot every day so they can having lighting in their house,” Toledo said.
The next product they are working on is developing a 10 watt PowerPot, which will be capable of charging multiple devices or larger tablet sized devices such as the iPad.